I made a fairly big mistake with my company at the start, I tried to segment functions in the company too fast. Maybe it was my business education, maybe it was books like “The E-myth Revisited,” and certainly it was my lack of management experience, but I tried to keep my area focussed on business development and away from technology for which “I have a CTO.”

But startups don’t work this way and the entire reason for working in a team is that you share the work and hopefully create synergetic effects (1+1=3!) in the process.

And the truth is that even as for non-technologist like myself (I am a geek though) designing products is not so hard.

I had a discussion with an industrial designer (my all time fav. people to hang around with) concerning the term ‘a perfect product.’ Her field understands the term as a product that functions perfectly, I choose to add “for the customer” to that definition.

The start of product design is always to ask: “so is this cool for people?“, meaning will they like it, do they need it, will they pay for it? I don’t think all question can be answered from the start, except the one of “is this cool?”

A very big part of entrepreneurship is sales, and as they say: you have to believe in what you sell. Easier when you already have a product, I’d love to sell Apple computers for a living, but when the product doesn’t exist, you have one of two choices: one, you design the product yourself, starting with “is it cool?”; two, you trust that your CTO can design something cool.

That’s not a problem, except for one thing: is cool something we decide or the market decides? It is of course the latter and one bullet point in an entrepreneur’s job description missing from that of the CTO’s is keeping a close eye on the market.

Therefore, product design is absolutely something entrepreneurs cannot delegate! And on that short note, I’ll leave it.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right. Picture courtesy of The Esoteric Church (of all places!).

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I asked yesterday for a more graphical and intuitive way to plan out costs for products and projects. The reason lies in an essay I co-authored several years ago with Jeremy Fein, co-founder of this blog. I forget the exact title of the thing, but its premise was that good entrepreneurial teams are composed of both brains & brawn (Asterix and Obelix, in other words). It has since become my philosophy towards entrepreneurship and building teams.

Good ideas also reside in intersections between different modes of thinking. I don’t know who made up the idea of the ‘execution multiplier for ideas‘ (Derek Sivers posted it on his blog once), but an idea is worth little without someone carrying it out. Similarly, in Neil Fiore’s book “The Now Habit” (the ONLY self-help book I would ever recommend to people) he writes about the source of good ideas, which often come when you least expect it: on your breaks, your holidays, anywhere which is not work-related.

While productivity is a great thing and crucial to executing ideas, idea-generation itself is actually not very compatible with the productive mind. But it’s not impossible to combine the two either.

Let’s look at a sample workflow from problem to idea generation to product (product meaning the outcome of idea generation, which has to lead somewhere):

1. You have a problem (duh… no really, don’t come up with an idea if it doesn’t solve a problem!)
2. You discuss it with people to try to figure out it’s parameters —what is the true gist of the problem?

This is a good time to get stuck. Where do you go from here? Do you go the left-brained route — the super-rational approach that would e.g. benefit from some number crunching in Excel? Or do you take a right-brained approach — the artistic approach of drawing out the problem further on a white board or an outliner?

It of course depends on the complexity of the problem, but it isn’t time yet to go super-rational all of a sudden. It breaks you out of creative solution mode and gets you into execution mode, which is really brain-dead “getting things done” mode. Before you get things done, you have to define “things” much further.

The next step in my process would be:
3. draw out several solutions, preferably in a group, and discuss them and the logic behind it. Is it an elegant solution to the problem? Does it solve it or does it complicate it? What scenarios are there and what are its parameters?

As soon as you come to scenarios, we come into process mode. And this is where a more left-brained approach of calculating resource-allocation (people, time, money) absolutely makes sense. In my last post, I was hoping that someone would have a good way of making this more compatible with step 3, I am still waiting for someone to come up with a good solution, however.

4. calculate it out. What are the costs associated with each solution, what are the benefits of each solution?

Costs vs. benefits could also be called expenses vs. income on a financial projection for a startup. Solid resource allocation is ultimately the lifeblood of a company, however in an early stage it is also the language to use when looking for funding for your company.

I don’t want to be too rigid about this; I’ve struggled with the process of “problem -> idea generation -> execution -> product” in the past and think that it’s an area that benefits from several approaches and also leads to more-than-several pseudo-suggestions on how to approach this.

Rather, I thought to expand a little on yesterday’s post and clarify why I really do want a more visual Excel (for lack of a better term). If you want to combine right- and left-brained perspectives, a white board alone won’t do it and Excel alone won’t do it. I want software that does both.

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Just a quick shout out to all you smart people out there. For a cost analysis, I’m trying to build several alternative cost-structures, but preferably in an outliner-like format. I’ll go into what I mean in a second, but if you can think of anything, please comment or send me a mail on techiteasyblog (at) Google Mail.

What I want is a combination of this:

And this:

And what I’d like to do with it is drag & connect different modules together and have it auto-add the end-sum when multiple modules are linked.

Any help appreciated, thanks! I have no reward for you at the moment, except if you’re in the Netherlands or I’m in your country, I’ll take you out for a drink and I will definitely pimp your site in this blog post if you include it with your awesome answer!

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When Firefox, previously called Phoenix and Firebird, launched tabbed browsing (well, after Bloatzilla), I was super-excited and pimping it to all my friends. It’s been a while since I felt this way and, with tab-saving in browsers (which I of course turn on), I tend to choose the browser with the least tabs saved in it. Apps like Choosy for the Mac, which gives me a pop-up with a choice of browsers whenever clicking a link, or which chooses the best-performing browser running at the time, are a life-saver, but they are just a piecemeal solution to a greater problem.

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

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This year, I had the chance to visit CeBit 2010 for the very first time. It was an anticlimactic experience. Being raised with reports of CESs and Macworlds, you can’t help but hope to stumble on the next big thing, but what I was confronted with what had the air of a dusty town ripped out of a Western movie after all the gold diggers left for fairer grounds. In this case, the gold drought is the recession, and the aftermath (to me) appeared as a number of very empty spaces and the remainder seemingly under-budgeted, not “2010 innovative” but 2007 innovative, and with a big sticker on their back saying: “I’m under-confident, please buy something!”

To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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Having reached a personal milestone, part 5 of my entrepreneurship diaries, I should mention that it’s very pleasurable and useful for me to write on these topics, and I hope it’s the same for you. In this post, I want to briefly address the issue of uncertainty in early stage technology companies and how that affects management.

As I mentioned before, I was asked to join this company as CEO after consulting them on the commercial applications of this exciting new technology. Joining a year later, we had a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the current organisation. During the consulting stage, I wrote a business plan with a fairly clear time line (to me and our sponsor), but it wasn’t being executed upon as required. One of my the deliverables I set myself was therefore to get development back on track, which not only respects the resource boundaries (financial, human, technological) we face, as well as sends out the signal that we are a serious business.

One thing I keep hearing over and over from entrepreneurs is that you have to be comfortable with ambiguity. And that is absolutely true. We continue to iterate on ideas based on changes in technology, customer and partner feedback, and our own ideas, something that would drive any sane man crazy, but we have to keep it under control. The best way that I find to do that is continuing to develop the vision of where we are going (the strongest motivator I can imagine) and maintain a loose type of project management that gets us to that goal.

I call this project management, as it deals with schedules, milestones, and resource allocation over a period of time. Uncertainty is an important factor to consider in this. In a large company, chances are you’re dealing with a predictable environment, in an early stage startup this is not the case. Getting a tighter schedule in place continues to be a challenge we are working on, however I find that being alert, flexible, and adaptive all the time contrasts with the more stable art of project management. Please correct me if I’m wrong, in which case present a solution also! Of course, there have to be thresholds in place, which to me is very much defined by risk assessment.

Regarding risks, let me start by saying that not all risks can be addressed, which is why being comfortable with ambiguity is so important. And second, there are many different types of risk, technology, financial, market, etc., but one usually outlines the thresholds that you have to respect. In my case, I see this clearly as market risk, as nothing matters if your customers aren’t buying… however, this really is not something to take for granted.

In medicine for instance, which is traditionally patent-based and largely dependant on a complex regulatory process, you have a 15 year window, of which you can spend up to 12 years developing your super-innovative cure. Clearly the technology risks outweigh the market ones (note: this ignores the rise of generic, cheap, knock-off drugs). In the web-industry, on the other hand, it’s perfect for rapid prototyping, it’s hard to protect innovations and easy for competitors to clone them, and it makes much more sense to push out your products asap. That means that there can be plenty of competition and the risk lies in grabbing sufficient market share to make a (sustainable) profit.

In our case, we are not as “high-tech” as medicine and not as “high-market” as web-development, in the sense that we face both market and technology risks. However, I see market risks as more important and try to align both market & technology approaches together. As an example, one of the things we did several months ago, was demo our technology to the general public and to selected partners. After the experience, we interviewed them thoroughly on their experience, as well as their initial expectations. We want to make sure that people don’t expect something different than what we deliver and that our product meets and exceeds their expectations. That gives us a clear view of where we want the product to go.

On a technology level, that presents us with certain thresholds in terms of “the experience” and price-points. And whenever we face a technology change, whatever solution is being developed, it has to fit within that end-picture the customer expects. That also overcomes the problem of black-box development, which is not uncommon in technology development.

So, that’s more or less how we continue to develop the vision for our company and the project management that supports it. We started with a lucid dream of producing great technology. We demoed initial versions and tried to align our vision to the needs of our users. And we end up (hopefully) building what our customers want and pay for. I would love to do this in a web-environment, as that really makes prototyping so much cheaper and quicker, but we do the best we can with our not so intangible technology.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

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I live in a funny world. My company, which is composed of several disciplines in the manufacturing, industrial design, and, yes, programming space, is one factor. I sometimes see people screw together contraptions in our workshop, and I see coders banging away at their PCs and Macs, and I wonder what the hell I am thinking calling programming low or high tech. There are different degrees to everything and just like metal and a few screws can lead to an amazing creation, so lines of code produces the amazing virtual reality I interact with most of my days.

This will be a short post. I think that the Internet has proven to be a two sided coin. It brought us freedom of information, but bits are also information, which makes it hard to gain value from them. Looking at it through a business lens (a flaw of mine) I can’t help but wonder if programming is a worthwhile direction to take, if you want to make money at least.

The other side is what I wrote about in paragraph one. Code produces wonderful things and I am grateful everyday for the fruits of that labour. So I sincerely hope that my world, the business world, will continue to allow for “the code” to reign free, and for those that produce code and its products, to reap the rewards and continue to do what they love.

So I apologise for whatever I wrote previously, namely that software is not high-tech, i.e. innovative, because it simply does not apply to all code (just to the 100s of 1000s of me-too apps and websites out there, which ruin it for the good ones).

This post was inspired by Fred Wilson’s post “Code As Craft” and by one of our interns producing “beautiful code.”

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This post is part of a series, a diary of starting a business if you will. It follows part 1, the decision of becoming an entrepreneur.

One thing I found out is that it’s hard to put your responsibilities down on paper… there are so many!!! There is of course a basic job-description, which more or less sounds like that of a project manager/pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat magician: “make it happen that we go from this thing on paper to the product in the hands of customers.” “Make it happen” is a super-loaded phrase, which can mean countless things.

There is a continuous struggle between micro-management and keeping the overview. Micro, because it is your responsibility that every (little) thing is carried out by your employees (if you have them). Overview, because You the entrepreneur are The Organisation. There is a third struggle that shouldn’t exist really, that between your professional life and your personal life. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to do this thing well is to focus on it exclusively. Friends, family, love, …blogging… it’s a nice luxury to have, but it comes second place.

The responsibility of an entrepreneur are thus: have a goal and make sure that everything is executed to get to that goal.

In a technology company, there are matters of technology and business (really, in what business except for strategy consulting isn’t there a mix of “technology,” which can mean anything from cooking to software development, and the commercial side of things, which is meant to pay for everything?). What I found was that as someone with a business background, who sort-of-kind-of has an idea about product development, and has a better grasp of business development, I still can’t let go of the reigns of product development entirely.

Product development ties in directly with business development. People are unwilling to pay for something that doesn’t exist and similarly our budget is supposed to last us until we have something worth paying for or investing in. Therefore, as an entrepreneur I have to make sure that product development stays on track. The absolute best way to do this is to have a capable product development manager in charge. The truth of it is that startups by their nature are resource-poor, which includes tripple-A product development managers (probably employed at multinational X or Y somewhere), and there is a lot of learning/training on the job. Learning/training means that the (hopefully) existing product development manager (in our case yes) still has to be managed, through schedules and regular meetings. In any case, product development is in its conceptual stage a very brainstorm-friendly activity, which means the more the merrier. But ultimately, a startup must get beyond this stage, respecting the entire resource-poor situation that a startup usually faces.

So, responsibilities of an entrepreneur as far as the technological product development is concerned: If you have a product development manager, you have to make sure that he works under the realities of the business. If you don’t, which I imagine many 1-person software startups operate under (as well as those lucky strategy consultants), well then you have to do the job of product development as well, keeping a close eye on the business realities.

OK, the business part of things. My role is fairly well-defined here as I come from a business background and approach startups from a business perspective. Assume that role 101 is having a firm grasp on everything that goes on, which can be phrased as “where are resources (people, time, money) being expended at and is it wise to do so.” This entails having a good budget plan and sticking to that.

Role 102 is to build the business, which I call business development, but that often gets confused with sales as that that is what it says in job adverts. Business development is the building of the business, which includes sales, but also includes building the company and all that entails.

So, we are trying to get from point A to point P, how do we go about it? If product development is about turning an idea into a product, business development is building a business plan into a business. Business plans are total BS unless they contain validated information. Some key-chapters in business plans are the market overview, the market approach, the time-line, and the financial need to meet all these objectives. Business plans can serve as a. cannon fodder, b. a plan of approach, c. one of several signals to attract investment. For c. no investor will take a look at your business unless you have a plan of approach (b.). On that plan, there should be a time-line, which you are following (predictability!) and there should be a goal: the market you are targeting and your approach.

The market section of the business plan presents a big problem for technology entrepreneurs. Because (non!) customers often don’t know what they want. I can ask a target group “what kind of air do you like to breathe?” and it wouldn’t surprise me if a significant number of responses would say: “I like to breathe air that smells like perfume.” OK, that’s a terrible question, but what I mean is that people sometimes make up answers that have nothing to do with reality (that said, both the perfume business and the fast-food industry have made lots of money from essentially selling air that smells good. Scent is also plays a very important part in memory, but I digress…)

What I’m a big fan of is validated market data, which is data gathered from actual customer experience with your product or part of it. That brings forth another problem of a bias towards early (and over-excited) adopters, something which the book “crossing the chasm” deals with, but is really not something that I think is realistic to address at an early stage, except that validated market data can also come from experts in the markets you are targeting.

The implication is also that product development is again completely tied in with business development which leads us down the path of rapid prototyping, another practice that works great in software / on the web, not as easily (though not impossible) with hardware. In any case, the experts in this area most well-known today are:

• - Steve Blank, who wrote “The Four Steps to Epiphany” and is currently hosting the excellent Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminars (btw. Steve Blank also writes a great blog on customer-focussed development, which I’ve only just started reading.
• - Eric Ries, who authors the blog Startup Lessons Learned and has some great articles on responsible (=lean) development.
• - And Donald Reinertsen, who wrote an incredibly dense book called “Principles of Product Development Flow,” a book which is clearly an authority in the field, but which I cannot recommend to any sensible entrepreneur with a 60hr/week schedule. Those principles, by the by, number in the 100+.

As well as of course Toyota and plenty of other experts out there, I’m sure, many of which are referenced by the people mentioned.

I think that it can safely be said that task 3 or a sub-task of business development is working towards the customer, the lifeblood of a business.

There are other tasks of course, which have to do with human resources, legal work, accounting, etc. Some of which can be outsourced, some of which can be done half-heartedly (oh no, I didn’t say that), some of which are really-really important, etc.

All these tasks, however, require a certain authority. The entrepreneur’s responsibility is to either be an authority on a task level or to be sure to work with authorities, either in the company or in an (informal) consulting fashion, so that they are carried out responsibly.

Task 4 can thus be entitled: be an authority on the tasks that need to be carried out or have access to one.

So, a whole can of worms starting a company can be and it is vital that it does not interfere with the single most important thing that you must do as a human being: be healthy! Health is part sleep, part exercise, part food, part love. There is no yin without yang and vice versa. Thus forget everything I said about personal life being no. 2. The best is if it reinforces what you do in your work. Health leads to happiness and happiness leads to optimism: a key-quality in entrepreneurship if there ever was one.

So the responsibilities of an entrepreneur summarised:

• 100: keep your eye on both sides of the court: the goal & the resources needed to get to that goal
• 101: align Product development with Business development
• 102: always validate your market data by staying close to your customers
• 103: be an authority on the tasks that need carrying out or have access to one
• 104: stay healthy and happy.

This was written in a single session with minimal editing. I hope it kind of makes sense. Part 3 of my e’diary will be on the topic of: can you prepare for entrepreneurship? As I have a master in entrepreneurship, I thought it might make for an interesting perspective. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ By choice, I’m being mysterious about my company. If you have questions, feel free to comment or write to me via the email address on the right.

Picture courtesy of Be The Dream.

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The following is a draft I wrote prior to the announcement of the iPad, but which I didn’t publish because it was a series of hypotheses based on an as yet non-existing product. It’s a series of thoughts on how an interface of a touchscreen larger than an iPhone might look like. It is inspired by both my experiences with Macs and since recently with an iPod Touch. Here goes.

A couple of thoughts I had last night (written on 13.01.2010) about interfaces, the current state of development for the iPhone OS, how Apple could build a hybrid of Mac and iPhone OS, and how the company could build multi-tasking into its rumoured tablet. My thought were the following:

a. A new category: I don’t think the iTablet, if it exists, will be either a Mac or an iPhone. My super-superficial reason: it doesn’t fit in the Mac line-up depicted on the online Apple Store (see pic), but a more underlying reason is that I don’t see space for it in either a Mac-category or a Mobile phone/media player category. Which is not to say that it won’t do either well, but I think it will more fall into the class of Netbooks, though of course with the purpose of bombing those low-tech, low-innovation devices out of the water… just like Apple did with MP3 players and with Phones. Note from today: as it turns out, the iPad is depicted below the iPod, iPhone, and Mac lines, but time will tell where it will be once it’s on sale.

b. The Keyboard: I think that any 10″ screen will demand more connectivity to secondary (Apple) devices than the iPhone allows for. That means, an external keyboard and mouse, which transforms the tablet into a desktop. I have less complaints about the software-keyboard now, after working with a Touch for a while, but I still don’t see it as an alternative for longer texts, which a larger screen would warrant. Some months ago, I made a stupid mock-up of the iPhone + a keyboard (see pic), which is how I envision it looking (only better).

c. The App Store: 3 Billion Apps downloaded, Apple just reported, which also suggests a kind of lock-in. For better or worse, developers have accepted the App-store and I think it works for several reasons for both, namely more protection from pirates, more predictability for developers when developing for the black hole that is Apple, and more control by Apple, which is what Apple likes, not to mention new income streams for both. I think the App Store will continue to exist and will present new challenges when talking about a larger screen. Note from today: I don’t believe that what we will get to see in less than two months will be that what people were playing around with after the Apple keynote. iPhone apps inflated to a larger screen, come on?

d: The User Interface: I’ve written previously about Quick Look in Snow Leopard and how I also dug its slight innovation in terms of in-icon playing of media. Previously, OS X also introduced Dashboard into Tiger (I believe), whose interface, on the surface at least, resembles the iPhone. My view is that Apple will give developers the option to just keep the same resolution apps as they have offered before, though not exclusively of course. But imagine “Quick Looking” an app and still having it run inside its “Icon,” while the user does something else. For the rest, I of course think that full-screen Apps will exist, which is where Dashboard comes in, or at least a type of Dashboard. (Note: that was wrong. More below.)

e. Integration with the Mac: One of the most underused interfaces, at least on my Mac, is Dashboard, which allows people to have continuously open widgets on anything from news, to games, to radio, to system monitoring. It’s useful for those purposes, but not really something i spend more than a few minutes at a time with. Yet the first thing that came to mind when thinking of a “Tablet,” using both iPhone and Mac interface components, was Dashboard. It creates a new layer on top of a traditional desktop, allowing for user-input and information display. When I envision someone running the apps that would work on the “iTablet” also, I think of it either being that you open up a new layer on your Mac and run the very same apps on it through something like a Dashboard-like interface. Or, and the simplest solution is usually the best, through having the Tablet sync through iTunes with regular applications on the Mac.

Note from today: well, obviously this was wrong, but there have been several theories aired of having a type of Dashboard on the iPad for apps like calculator and weather, which don’t at all make sense to run in single focus on a larger screen than the iPhone.

Further thoughts from today: I do think that we will see a new OS update for both the iPhone and iPad before the release of the iPad. This will address the concerns that people have about it just being a larger iPod Touch. For the rest, to me the only downside to this device is the lack of a front-facing camera for video-calling, and some minor things. And I also think it’s the perfect “parent device!” What the Wii was to gaming, the iPad is to computing, addressing a very very blue ocean.

As previously stated, I’m still in line to get one this year, though only after trying one first.

Vincent

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OK, time to write a few words about the iPad. In true spirit of fanboyishness I started (and finished) writing this post in bed on my iPod Touch. Let me start by saying that with reservations I want the iPad. Reservations include that like you, I haven’t actually used the device, and that it doesn’t include a front facing camera which is a real shame. Flash… Pah! I really don’t care. Anyone who experienced the professional look, feel and support you get even from a €0.79 game on the Touch or iPhone isn’t going back to freeware flash (read my Farmville review as an example).

I’m not trying to provoke you by being so dismissive of flash, even though I feel a lot of people really really hate how the iPad turned out. I am only writing out of my own current and past context and reserving final judgement until it’s in my hands.

My context is several. I was born into an age when there weren’t any personal computers. As a matter of fact, Apple had only just been conceived when I was born. I grew up without computers, until I got a toy Amiga at 13, and a very buggy 1st PC at 15. It ran DOS mostly and crashed a lot in Windows 3.1. I mention this because people in my generation suffer from a curse. We were forced to learn a zillion crappy commands as teens, which made our parents and family members consider us computer geniusses and not a week goes by when I don’t get at least 1 question about a bug in a computer. Last week, I spent maybe 5 hours trying to get a Wifi card to communicate with an Internet radio, I will have to set up skype VOIP at my parents’ house this year and who knows what else.

My no. 2 reason for getting an iPad? To give it to my parents and save me future headaches (knock on wood).

My no. 1 reason is different. Last December, my MacBook was lost on a train. I’m using an older MacBook from work at the moment and digging this iPod Touch a lot. In many ways I do more on the Touch now. It has its flaws of course, and no it has nothing to do with “openness” or flash. The screen is too small and there are times (less than you would think) where I need a physical keyboard.

So picture my context. I travel a fair amount, I think the MacBook is not always neccessary but the Touch/iPhone is not always enough. The Touch meets my casual gaming needs (serious games, that’s what consoles are built for), it kind of meets my wordprocessing needs (still typing on the Touch …). So why on earth, for that price, wouldn’t I want an iPad?

Truth be told, I was considering getting a sleek MacBook Pro to replace my lost MacBook. But for years, I’ve secretely lusted after a shiny iMac as well, never being able to justify having both a laptop and a desktop. The iPad is not a standalone PC. It needs to be synced with one (every week or so). But it also gives me a chance not not restrict computing to a small 13-15″ screen and buy a “real” computer so that makes sense to me.

In my UNIQUE context, the iPad makes sense. In my less unique context regarding my parents, it makes sense. 2010 is hopefully a year of less computing headaches and more of just getting things done.

the end
Vincent

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I do admire Geeks. I have nothing but respect for their work.

Their contribution with open source software to today’s world is unquestionnable. The idea that a bunch of coders came up with such great solutions as Firefox, Linux, Gimp, Eclipse, OpenOffice, JBoss (and all Java Enterprise frameworks) to name a few that I use on an everyday basis, this idea is just amazing.

Back in the day when I was working for In Fusio, a start-up doing video games and services for the mobile phone industry, I had this wonderful opportunity to work with a bunch of the most talented ones. These guys implemented the first over-the-air download system for mobile phones back in the early 2000’s. In 2 and a half years I’ve learnt as much as I would have in ten years in any other company.

What I’ve noticed though, is that geeks are not passionate about products. They are passionate about technology.

Just like old tribes have rites to pass and become a man, one has to harness the technology to get some consideration from a Geek.

Read more »

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I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

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This movie was one I anticipated for some time. I’m a Sci-Fi geek, a movie freak, and a Cameron disciple (ever since Terminator 2). Most important to me today however: seeing whether the world of cinema was about to change forever… or not. My review will *not* be about the story, but about a number of themes it addresses, namely the 3D experience, motion capture, and (some spoilers) it’s environmental message.

First, the 3D experience. I’m afraid I didn’t like it very much from where I was sitting. And that I learned is one of the keys to watching a 3D flick, you have to experience it just right.

A couple of thoughts on the human experience: You have to wear glasses, you have to sit in the right place, and no one can pass the screen to go to the bathroom or else all is destroyed.

• The glasses: there are generally 2 types of glasses used in 3D cinema, active ones with shutter technology, and passive ones, which are just like regular, slightly over-sized sunglasses. I used the latter. Having biked for 30 min. at full speed just to get to the cinema on time (that’s how geeky I am about this), I found that sweat really didn’t agree with these glasses. The cinema provided me with one of those alcohol drenched tissues, but that definitely didn’t last me through the two+ hour movie. For the rest, I found them a little dark and the image without them was a lot clearer, though of course not meant for regular 2D viewing.
• Sitting just right: so I arrived to a packed cinema, meaning that I had to sit bottom-center-right and also that I have to try to see the movie again in a more empty cinema. To me the viewing experience definitely seemed sub-par and I will have to research optimal placement prior to seeing my next 3D movie.
• Other people’s bladders: so a couple of things disrupted the experience: my seating position, the subtitles, and people passing the 3D screen to go to the bathroom. The latter seemed to disrupt the image physically with the light of the entire image actually changing, and my thought is that they must have disrupted the beamer in some way. And while the subtitles seemed to float as much as the rest of the objects (see next paragraphs), they took away from the illusion of staring into a wonderful 3D world at times.

Generally, I think that Avatar should actually be viewed in an IMAX theater, which has a far larger screen and is designed for 3D, and not a regular cinema converted to 3D, which seems to be all the rage these days. And while dubbed movies kind of suck, I think it may be a better choice for people like me residing in a non-English country.

THE BIG QUESTION: So how was the actual 3D? Apart from the qualms I mentioned, actually pretty interesting! A few years ago, I watched Superman Returns at an IMAX, which required me to put and take my 3D glasses on and off as a green or red symbol appeared on screen and that sucked. But for Avatar, I could keep the glasses on all the time.

The 3D itself wasn’t the pop-out kind either, rather it was like you were looking into a window at 3D objects. In one scene, Sam Worthington’s character was exploring the alien jungle and looking at some exquisite flowers and it felt to me like I was standing opposite him looking at the same objects, which was nothing short of amazing!

I liked 3D a lot in slow scenes like this, but fast scenes such as battles were a little harder to follow. Cameron tells one hell of a story though, which drew you into the picture regardless.

Topic 2: Motion capture
The actual revolution that this movie is supposed to herald is the new kind of motion capture used, called performance capture. As far as I understand it, it allows for a few innovations in film making: accurately capturing face movement, having real characters interact realistically with virtual ones, and, for the camera person, seeing in realtime the result of the performance capture through the camera’s viewfinder.

THE BIG QUESTION: did it work? Hell yes!!! You notice it first with the female antagonist, Neytiri played by Zoe Saldaña (I had no idea!), who is completely “performance captured,” and whom you fall in love with within a few minutes. Her face shows an amazing range of emotions, from anger to joy, that demands an emotional response from the viewer. The last time I found myself infatuated with a virtual character was in King Kong, where I felt real sympathy with this fantastical character that Peter Jackson brought to screen.

Topic 3: the environmental message (limited spoilers ahead!)
Yes, one of the strongest themes of this movie was preserving a planet, respecting it’s inhabitants, both plant and creature. It was very powerful, I thought, but some people may consider it as preachy.

The problem with this message is that following it would require us to abandon 99% of our technology and return to a lifestyle more connected with nature and I’m very sceptical that this could ever happen, certainly not in time for this century’s crisis.

What Avatar manages to show is that the human race, through it’s relentless need for progress and profit, will always end up destroying that which exists in order to create something new. Avatar condemns our race to a “dying planet” and it can’t send a sadder message than that.

In Conclusion:
Above all, Avatar is an Action and Sci-Fi flick, and a good one at that, but it also makes you think, which many of Cameron’s movie seem to do. Definitely a re-watch for me, both on the silver and the small screen.

Rating: 7/10

Vincent
(p.s. minus the added formatting and picture just now, this post was written on an iPod Touch, forever dispelling my notion that typing on a touch screen is impossible. It did lead to some typos & grammar errors, mostly caused by it’s 95% useful predictive spelling engine.)

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The question I’m always asked when I run out of my friends/colleagues/dog patience with the issue of Digital Natives integration within the enterprise is : how to convince the proponents of this culture to adhere to a common professional project, to an organization with rules and commitments ?

The answer is straight-forward : leadership. A leadership for a post-ideologic generation. A leadership whose core resides in simple and clear principles, to put in practise, rather than plastic values nobody believes in.

Enterprise 2.0 represents a gradual immersion of the XXth century organisations into the web culture. Digital Natives Companies are born from this culture : there is no change required to adopt these principles as they are the core foundations the companies were built on.

In order to illustrate this assertion (and as promised), an overview of 37Signals, a GenY company achieving incredible results, from both financial and reputation perspectives. Read more »

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In my continuous drive to “pimp” my Mac experience, I use this application switcher called “LiteSwitch.” It hasn’t been updated in years, but it still works and amongst some other cool features, it allows me to see (and manipulate) all running processes, including the hidden ones (which I choose to hide on a case-by-case basis).

Here’s what the Google Chrome Browser shows me.

Every time I open multiple tabs, it shows me a process, called Google Chrome Helper. With half a dozen tabs open, I soon have these processes filling up my whole tab-switcher.

I realise that Chrome is in alpha, beta, or whatever disclaimer they use these days, but I just think it’s really messy. Ironically, it is the fastest browser on my system and I really do lean towards it when quickly wanting to browse the net. Even though the average user will not see these aesthetic little bugs, I sincerely hope that they clean it up a.s.a.p.. Even Chromium, its seemingly more mature brother, displays the same behaviour.

Stop being so beta, Google!

/Vincent

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