Passion for Innovation

Animoto - Cool and Quick Videos

2009-11-06T17:37:00.000+01:00

A while back I was pointed to Animoto, but I didn't really have a good subject to experiment. Animoto is a services that helps you to create professional looking impression videos. All you have to do is upload some pictures and video, select a nice tune for background music and off you go. I really like this kind of easy services that even can make me look like a professional.

Today I did have a good topic for an experiment. Yesterday I was jury at the Delft Design & Engineering Award and during the day made some pictures and even a short video. I uploaded some of the pictures and below you see the 30 second video result.

The free version only allows 30 second videos, but 30$ a year gives you full length videos. For future video I will definitely upgrade.

For those interested, the photos are created with my iPhone in combination with the Posterous Application and can all be found at my posterous blog.

Delft Design & Engineering Award

2009-11-03T18:53:00.001+01:00

Over the last few days I've been studying a set of interesting innovative ideas. This all part of the Delft Design & Engineering Award and my participation as a jury member. It's both interesting and challenging to study the broad range of ideas. Personally I like the variety of solutions and the different technical areas. Again I'm happy with my technical background helping me to study some of the concepts.

If your are interested to learn what students in Delft are doing go and have a look at the different videos that are created by the participants. If you are really confident you can even vote and identify your personal winner.

How Difficult is it to Repair a Broken Audi Timing Belt?

2009-10-30T21:17:00.000+01:00

This is a story how some bad luck killed my faith and trust in a perceived quality brand. It's about a car that quite unexpectedly broke down. The main character is an Audi A3 from 2005, properly maintained and with only 70.000 km on the clock.

On the night of Saturday August 15th it all started, after a nice night at the theatre I was driving home when suddenly at the highway the engine stopped. In the past this happened a few times before, but it would usually get going again after a few seconds. The electronics had been replaced and for year and a half it had been alright. This time however, the engine stayed dead and I came to a stop. I called road side assistance and they arrived in about 30 minutes, they arranged towing, a replacement car and we arrived home safely, just a few hours later. The road side service was excellent and sort of felt good, because except for the delay there were no real hassles.

The following monday some phone calls gave the impression that everything would be fixed in few days. Due to some insurance issues I would get an other replacement car and the sun was still shining. In the following weeks I sometimes checked on the progress, but apparently the replacement parts needed to get ordered and this took some time. On September the 17th I finally received a phone call from the workshop that the car was drivable again, but they discovered issues with the motor management system and it wasn't sure yet when I would get the car back. After the weekend and five weeks after the failure I got my Audi back.

I don't know what it was, but the car didn't sound right. At very low speeds there was some vibration, it didn't feel good. Two days after the car returned I was giving warnings on the cooling liquid temperature. I checked the cooling liquid levels and they looked fine. The car went to the workshop, but of course the warning light dimmed and the response back was: It was probably just some air in the pipes. They also concluded that the noise was a bit strange and they would check it later, for now I could drive the car The following weekend I drove quite a distance and it was really noisy, to the point you needed earplugs. The cooling liquid temperature warnings returned and warnings on issues with motor management system started too. The car went again back to the workshop and I was given another replacement car, of course older and worse than my own. To make the misery complete, also the replacement car broke down. Checking with the workshop learned that the motor management and temperature lights were fixed, but the noise was something serious, it was something deep in the engine.

I was getting more and more pissed at this stage. It was now about 7 weeks after the failure and no indication when the issue would be solved. The workshop gave me a nice replacement car, for the first time better than my own, probably because they also realized they are messing up. A week later I returned the replacement car, because I was going on 2 week vacation and didn't need the car in between. All I was hoping for was to get my own car back after my vacation.

During the vacation my Audi returned from the workshop and my companies car fleet manager took it for a test drive. Unfortunately again motor management warnings were given. He returned the car to the workshop again and after investigation they concluded that the catalytic convertor had broken down. Ordering a now one would take some time, but I could without problem drive the car. Well at this stage I was more than happy to do so, but I did warn them that in case I would stop along the road, they would for sure get in the press. After this I was given again a replacement car, instead of my own.

Tomorrow it's 11 weeks after the initial failure, there is no indication when and if ever the car gets fixed and returned to me.

I hope Audi reads this post and realized that bad service and repairs can do serious damage to their brand. Like Guy Kawasaki, Audi could give me a R8 to drive for a while, may be that would restore some of my faith in Audi again.

I love Windows 7, but I won't upgrade!

2009-10-27T20:28:00.000+01:00

I've written several times (first impressions and after a month use) about Windows 7, I really love the product and even made an endorsement video. It's the best Windows version ever. As a business user I've adopted Windows 7 as my primary operating system since the early beta in January. However as a private person I will NOT upgrade my home equipment, due to practical consumer considerations.

My house is a mixed Apple and Microsoft environment consisting of MacBooks, a desktop and a Media Center. Both the desktop and the media center are running Vista Ultimate, because I was one of the fools that 3 years ago believed the Microsoft promise for Ultimate Extras. I prefer in place upgrades over clean installs, but that is now making an upgrade a too expensive exercise.

The Media Center is a critical component in this house hold and the only 'maintenance' window available is in the night. This is also the reason why no automatic updates can't be installed, because this might interfere with lets say an episode of 'Desperate House Wives' or even worse reboot the machine. Microsoft already made severe enemies in this household by resetting all play counts after a security update and I don't want to go thru that again. If I want to upgrade this machine within one night and maintain all settings my only option is to do an in place upgrade and will cost me 299 Euro. It's just no worth the money, because the added value is minimal and Vista works fine. I could consider alternatives and do a clean install of a downgraded Windows 7 version, but still it's relatively expensive. A more viable option is to buy an Apple TV starting at 269 Euro and start using this side by side to avoid the nightly maintenance Window.

The desktop is an other story. Windows Vista is giving a lot of problems and was actually the primary reason to install the first beta of Windows 7. The hardware is great, because I made it completely silent, it's only time for a 300 Euro investment for a larger screen. While considering my options with the required investments, I can't help also looking at the new 21.5-inch iMac starting at only 1099 Euro that gives me a silent, great looking piece of design in my office.

Apple does an upgrade form Leopard to Snow Leopard for 29 Euro. The Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade of 299 Euro is 10 times as expensive. The buying considerations are very different, the first is hardly worth thinking about, the second really needs to deliver value. Unfortunately I haven't found 10 times as much value in Windows 7 as in Mac OS-X Snow Leopard. As a practical consumer I don't want to spend this amount of money without being able to justify the investment.

I'm not Dead

2009-10-23T06:48:00.000+02:00

I haven't written anything recently because I'm on a vacation, you can follow my whereabouts on this OnTheRoad.to traveling blog. The trip is nice and especially interesting because 23 years ago I did visit some of the same places... The world has changed a lot, but the experiences and memories stay the same.

23 years ago I was a young student, I was top fit, running up and down the different canyons. I was with a friend on a 'do the south-west of the US on a budget in 10 days' trip. We rented a cheap wreck camped in the bush or national parks and probably lived on junk food. The year before I was an international exchange student and used contacts from that time to gather information and if possible even organized meetings. This was 1986 and we actually wrote handwritten letters to establish contact and organize meeting points. We couldn't afford international phone calls. During the trip we also made new friends and often agreed to meet again in a few days several hundred miles away.

Today we travel in a decent car, use motels and hotels to stay overnight and can afford to eat proper meals. We carry around cellphones, navigation equipment and have WiFi in every single place we stayed so far. We extensively use the internet to gather information, book rooms while we are on the road. We constantly stay in touch with everybody who is interested and even keep up with business email. It all became so easy.

Looking back the past looked so primitive and it surprises me that with all the limited communication means we managed to stay in contact while being on the road. However the memories lasted for more than 23 years and the experiences were the same as they are today. Did we really make progress over the years, cos I really wonder how long today's experiences last?

On the road to....

2009-10-10T21:26:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago I ran into a nice new travel blogging service OnTheRoad.to. Before I wrote something about it I had to test it a bit. Last weekend I spend some time at the October Festen in Munich and it was a good opportunity to test.

Often when you go in a trip it's nice for the people staying at home to keep them up to date of your adventures. This is exactly what the specialized blogging services does. You create a trip page that combines a map with your whereabouts including stories, images and other multi media. There are many ways to create content, of course you can use the web site, but it's also possible to email, text message or use on of the mobile applications. I personally love the iPhone application, because you can create 'offline' content and publish when you have a data connection. This is very convinient when you want to control your data roaming expenses when traveling,

Tomorrow I start a bit of traveling again and you are more than welcome to follow my whereabouts.

Information Technology Challenges

2009-10-09T21:49:00.089+02:00

Working in the Information Technology brings every day interesting challenges. We value feedback from prospects and customers, what brings very interesting and a very wide range of requests for change.

Many customers like the solutions the way they are, while others request more powerful features and capabilities. Recently the ease of use and easy to learn is recurring feedback too. It's up to us to find the right mix in often conflicting requests so the largest group of people can benefit. It's almost an impossible task to make everybody happy, be we keep on trying.

Doing nothing, although the easiest thing to do is not an option. We need to guide our customers into the next wave of technology to make sure their businesses can stay competitive.

It's like Steve Ballmer says in the video from a recent keynote. Sales and Service, online - realtime, Information technology is more critical then ever. The next technology wave allows us to innovate and do some great things.

My Social Profiles

2009-09-29T00:44:00.000+02:00

I signup and experiment with many different emerging services and startups. During these experiments I've collected quite some social profiles. Below you find some of those that solely focus on creating a user profile with a purpose to aggregate it all in one list.

It's interesting to notice the different approaches, some focus on making the profiles very shiny and flashy, while others just try to collect as much information as possible.

However the coolest of them all, and not even mentioned in the list, is the one you need to see in action. It comes from the MIT Media lab and is called personas. Give it a try, enter your name and it attempt to characterize you as a person. It tells me that 'online' dominates my life!

The 'Blogs of Note' effect

2009-09-20T16:30:00.005+02:00

I write this blog for fun and it's just a way for me to share some of my thoughts with those interested. I attract between 800 and 1000 monthly visitors, what I already consider a reasonable achievement.

Last Thursday the number of visitors suddenly changed, because Blogger gave this blog a 'Blogs of Note' listing. I noticed this due to a significant increase in comments and it got me pretty excited. A few hours after the listing I already hit the 400 visitors and that was already a big record. The next day I monitored the statistics and couldn't believe the first 1000 and soon the second 1000 and ending the day over 4000 visitors. The next day it already slowed down and it will be interesting to see how long before it's back to normal again.

Next to the blog visitors also the blog followers and RSS subscriptions increased significantly. This is really exciting because it shows that there are people who like what I write.

Since it was the first day that I got a significant number of visitors I also has a look a the browser statistics and is was quite interesting to see that only half of the visitors was with Internet Explorer and about one third with FireFox.

I'm now curious how this will develop over time. Do any of the sudden visitors stick around and become regular visitors. In a few months we will see what happened. I will keep you updated.

The Solution counts, Not the Product

2009-09-10T22:37:00.000+02:00

Today I got referred to a Microsoft SharePoint article with a rather bashing title: Danger! Do not implement SharePoint in your Organization! I'm absolutely no SharePoint expert, but I do know it is pretty successful in the market place. It just can't be that bad!

I did read the article and it is a whole lot better than the title suggests. I absolutely underwrite it's not about the technology but about the business challenge you are solving. No business is interested in 'implementing products' but in solving their challenges.

It's important to always identify the business needs with as much detail as possible. Scope these down into a feasible project, because it's a lot easier to build more on early successes instead of repairing last minute failures. Select the product/technology that has the potential to solve the challenges and, very important, select the right partner for helping you with the implementation. Does the partner have the domain expertise and a credible track record in solving similar challenges.

It's like a puzzle, focus on the solution, not the problem!

Image credit: lumaxart

My 2 Cents on User Experiences

2009-09-08T00:19:00.000+02:00

Regularly I attend product meetings dealing with planning, priorities and projects to be included in the next releases. It's always an interesting and challenging balancing act between deliverables and available capacity. Customer value, market opportunity, return on investment and costs are usually recurring topics. Today I was also involved in one of these meetings and we quite extensively spoke about User Experience as customer value. After the meeting I had an interesting meeting with one of the team member on the topic. He challenged me to briefly write down my vision on user experience.

First let me tell you that I'm NOT an expert on the topic. I'm an engineer by trade and according to Alan Cooper this immediately disqualifies me from having a vision on user experience. Further my views are related to business software, because that is my field of expertise.

In conversations the terms User Experience and Usability are often used interchanged, however for me they have 2 completely different meanings
1. Usability is for me the technical capabilities that the product can be used in an easy way. Does the product behave the way I expect, is there a logical flow of events etc. It's for me very related to the functionality of the product. Usability improvement are there for often related to reduction of mouse clicks, handy wizards, etc.. that just make it for me easier to do my job.
2. User Experience is for me more of an emotional state. It's about the feeling I get when I use the product, does is make me excited, relaxed, frustrated. What is the overall impression, and that includes unwrapping, first time use, etc. It actually does not have so much to do with the functionality, because I just assume it's there.

Some examples
1. Why do I prefer the user experience of my Mac over a PC? The sensual touch of the aluminum casing and the soft strokes on the large touch pad when using 2 fingers to gently scroll this document just makes me feel good. The Mac triggers my senses...
2. In rare cases technical usability improvements create real better user experiences. One example is the Google chrome omnibar. Up until a year ago most browsers had 2 input boxes in their header. One was for typing an internet address and the other one for searching. This was not only confusing, but the search box was quite often too small. Merging the two reduced confusion, created a larger search box and just make complete sense. I feel good when I'm using it.

Now back to business software, because there are many user experience related challenges. May be the most important one: who cares, I have to use it from my boss! The key challenge is to create business software that people want and love to use! This can not be done by just improving the usability. This will make the people more efficient, but it won't make them happier. The saved time will be used to surf their favorite websites, that will make them happy!

If I had the solution I would implement it tomorrow, but unfortunately I don't. However I do believe we need to show some more creativity and refocus on the emotional values for our users. I aim to continuously push forward to search for creative solutions that get to the heart of our users.

Image credit: Nicki Dugan

PaaS Rocks!

2009-09-06T21:53:00.000+02:00

Recently I've been playing around a bit with the Google App Engine. Slowly I start to learn how all this Platform as a Service is going to influence the future of software development.

Today I was just checking some of the log files of the little application I'm working on and saw a lot of warning messages.

The logging, the messages and heaps of information all comes with the platform. I still remember the days that all this kind of plumbing had to be build by ourselves in order to get information on the performance of your applications. This is going to really gonna benefit our customers, we just get more capacity to create value for them.

Now another interesting part of the message is the fact that I soon will exceed some of my quotas. This literally means that it's gonna cost me money. This is a real good motivator for me to optimize the solution, because I just can't throw some extra cheap hardware against it. It will be recurring costs for the rest of the life cycle of the solutions... So I better get back to some coding and deal with the CPU usage problem.

Platform as a Service Rocks!

Google App Engine versus Microsoft Azure

2009-09-05T00:32:00.000+02:00

This is going to be a bit of a dangerous post, because I'm no expert in both. It's going to be like comparing:

Google versus Microsoft
Consumer versus Corporate
Personal versus Professional
Mac OS-X versus Windows
Simple versus Advanced
Convenience versus Sophistication

The reason for this post is feedback I received on the Keeping up with Technology post where I discussed a little hobby project on the Google App Engine. Some of my professional relations asked why I didn't build it on Microsoft Azure.

Disclosure: I work as Technology Director for Exact Software and I manage the technology part of our partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft delivers great technology that enables us to create value for our customers. This is also shown in the Windows 7 endorsement I recorded a few months ago.

A couple of months ago I actually started to develop something on Azure. It started like this, visit the Azure website looking for a getting started. There is a lot of information, but not really a step by step guide to get started. I figured out that I needed to register and thus I filled a couple of forms. After completion I received a message that I would get an answer within 24 hours. End of the project so far.

Since I wasn't satisfied I tried decided to try the Google App Engine instead. Go to the Google App Engine site and immediately found the Getting Started Guide. Just 2 small downloads for the SDK and Python and a text editor and I was in business. An hour later my 'hello world' application was up and running. This without any previous experience on Python and many stupid mistakes on case sensitive code. I felt good and was proud on the result.

The next day I hoped to receive my developer key for Azure so I could start comparing. Unfortunately no key arrived and I twittered about it. Someone from the Azure team noticed this and helped me out, good service, but I had to wait again for a day for a key.

Finally I got the key and started to explore Azure. On the Azure site I couldn't find a simple tutorial for a 'hello world' application. There are many advanced examples, but all too complex for me. Again Twitter came to rescue and quickly I received a link to a simple 'hello world' tutorial. Finally I could start to set up a developer environment. I already had Visual Studio installed, lucky me, but the developer environment also requires a local SQL server. A large download, a service pack and quite some time later I could finally start writing a few lines of code. Package the solution and deploy.

I haven't explored any of the differences in capabilities between Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine, but it's a clear case between convenience and sophistication.

When I decided to explore some of the cloud computing, the above memory was still in my mind. This combined with my preference of Mac OS-X over Windows 7 made the choice for the Google App Engine a simple one. A hobby is to relax and have fun!

You Can't Eat Whuffie...

2009-09-03T23:32:00.000+02:00

I mentioned earlier that I'm not much of a reader. Twitter made it even worse and I can't handle a lot more then 140 characters. However I also mentioned that I like 'The Whuffie Factor' a lot.

Yes we all need money, but is it really what we value the most. Tara Hunt nicely shows that in the presentation embedded below or here on SlideShare is also excellent.

Tara actually was one of the people that inspired me to explore more and more in the Social Media space. It's fun and I really enjoy matching and mixing social and business functionality.

Keeping up with Technology

2009-08-30T21:39:00.000+02:00

Technology companies are usually busy with three stages of technology. The current, the emerging and the future. In my role at Exact, where we create business software, I also have to deal with these different stages. For business software companies the stages are 'on premise' licensed software, 'Software as a service' (SaaS) and the future related to 'Platform as a Service' (PaaS).

'Platform as a Service' is a topic the technology world talks about a lot, but is not really on the mind of our customers. However it's important that technology companies research the future possibilities in order to be ready when the business opportunities rise. The decision makers have moved on in their careers and for the research they rely on very smart engineers, architects and technology partners.

I also left my real engineering days behind me. However I still like some hands-on work and in the last weeks I also started a little hobby project on the Google App Engine. The solution that I will reveal a little later is not really important, but I enjoy to get a better understanding of the changing concepts and how organizations need to adapt. The learning curve is pretty steep for a rusty guy like me, but the experience is good. I already learn that there will be quite some impact on the design of very data driven applications, because during the development the data is a lot harder to access and all relational database concepts needs to be revised for proper scaling.

... and now the moment you have been waiting for. I work, inspired by FriendFeed on a little life streaming application. You can check it out at http://hello.aadjemonkeyrock.com and remember it's just a little skunk work for fun.

Friday Snow Leopard, the First of many Gadget to come this Winter

2009-08-24T22:04:00.000+02:00

Apple announced today, earlier as expected, that Snow Leopard will be available as of Friday. This gives me something to do over the weekend. And Yes, I do think it's worth the 49 Euro for the Family pack. The support for Microsoft Exchange and an additional 6Gb of free disk space alone are already worth the money.

In October Microsoft also comes with an updated operating system, Windows 7. I also look forward to this, because it's a lot better than Windows Vista. However I'm, depending on pricing, probably be a bit more hesitant to upgrade. In this house holds already 1 Vista Ultimate is upgraded to Windows 7 RC out of desperation, but it's a hardly every used PC. Further there is a Vista Ultimate Media Center that unfortunately can not be upgraded to a down graded version without a clean install. Microsoft, please understand that many people don't want clean installs, especially on a media center when you loose all play counts and other statistics. The rumored Ultimate upgrade price of more than 200 Euro is almost the same as an Apple TV. This is gonna be a tough choice.

Today Nokia announced a cool new Netbook with a 12 hour battery life. Nokia phones always have excellent battery life, so I do sort of take this announcement seriously. I would love to have a Netbook that is decent looking and has great battery life and a proper screen resolution. I can't wait for more details.

And finally I'm waiting for all the rumored tablets. I haven't heard much about the CrunchPad recently. I just hope it isn't dead and it will be available soon. It's gonna be a great device to surf the web while laying on the couch, sitting on a terrace etc. This of course doesn't eliminate the necessity of an Apple tablet too. The CrunchPad for traveling, hanging around in the city and an Apple tablet to carry around to meetings in the office.

What gadgets are you looking forward to this winter?

Great Example - Engage with your Customer

2009-08-23T19:53:00.000+02:00

A warm and sunny Sunday afternoon, a great time for a few drinks on the beach. I'm not the only one resulting in many visitors to a small coastal place.

People are in a good mood, a bit lazy and might not pay attention watching their valuables and locking their vehicles. Some some people this environment is a great place for car burglary. Criminals just don't care you are having a good time.

It's also a great place to have a few drinks and since you are so relaxed and due to the sun you might for the moment forget you still have to drive. Unfortunately this also results in to much driving under influence of alcohol.

Normal warning signs just don't work anymore. Nobody pays attention. What other ways are there to get the peoples attention. When I arrived in town the temporary welcome sign immediately caught my eye and I kept watching. It displayed a set of rotating messages, starting with a welcome and continuing with a few warning. I felt that the police was engaging with me and really wanted to help.

It's all about Speed

2009-08-17T19:41:00.000+02:00

This is a story to remind all technology geeks, including myself, that the best features are not always what they seem to be.

The story starts in december 2008 when I was having heaps of connectivity troubles with our Windows Vista 'Home' PC. It let to a lot of complaints from my girlfriend and me having to give her a lot of time consuming support. The practical solution, and one of my best gadget investments ever, was to buy her a MacBook. The Apple completely changed her computer usage, just because sleep mode works and the startup wait was about 2 seconds to get a Wifi connection. All she wants is to email, surf the web and sometimes IM. In the past she would email every other day, now multiple times a day, whenever there are 2 minutes of spare time.

I maintain the software updates of her Mac and usually I hold off for a while and use my own Mac to test first. In recent months I also delayed the update to Safari 4, due to some known compatibility issues with our internet banking. Last week I updated her Mac to the latest 10.5.8 Max OS-X release that includes also Safari 4. The whole week, every day again, she keeps telling me how happy she is that the internet is on immediately. She hasn't noticed the change to Safari 4, but the disappearance of the 2 seconds delay for a Wifi connection are very noticeable for her. In her own words: It's all about speed.

Now what can we learn from this? We spend hours, days, weeks analyzing all the upcoming new features of our new gadgets that we forget what is really important for the average user. I'm pretty sure that a lot more is written about Safari 4 as is about the improved Wifi connection. It's like the Google What is a browser? videos. Who cares..

Note: A month after the MacBook purchase, the early beta of Windows 7 solved most of the connectivity problem. However Microsoft still doesn't come close to the Apple instant on feature.

Image Credit: John Talbot

Lazyfeed, Just Right for Me!

2009-08-16T17:19:00.000+02:00

I've written about RSS feeds before and hoped to believe that everybody would be able to use them. Looking around taught me that this is not the case. RSS is great and we should continue to publish as much content as possible, because this allows others to build alternative user interfaces around the content enabling a broader reach for the content.

One of these alternative user interfaces is Lazyfeed, as the name indicates it's for lazy people that don't want to maintain hundreds of feeds in a reader, check them a couple of times a day, scan headlines for something interesting, etc...

Last week I picked up an invite code true Louis Gray. I played around with it over the weekend and I like it. It won't replace my regular feed reader for reading my oh so many RSS feeds, but it's an addition for exploring something new. It's very easy to use, the sign-up barrier is very low and you can start exploring right away.

Just search for your favorite topics and in real-time articles start to stream in. You can save your topics for later and when you return new article are available. This brings you very easily to new interesting content.

Alternatively you can link your favorite sites to you account and automatically the topics of those sites are extracted and a stream of interesting content is created for you. Now your really don't need to do anything and as lazy as you are you can start exploring.

Louis Gray also posted a nice introduction video, much nicer as I can explain it to you. You find it here if the video doesn't show up.

I don't know the current official status of Lazyfeed, but I'm sure if you reach out to Louis Gray he will be able to help you out.

For me, I go back exploring after saying: Louis, thank you for the invite.

Summer and Summer jobs

2009-08-14T21:22:00.000+02:00

The summer is a great period, nice weather, outdoor dinners and regular beers on a nice terrace. People are a lot more relaxed and seem to have more time. People take vacation and business is slow, again providing time for other things.

A week ago I already wrote about the hands-on activities in the quiet summer period and how much I enjoyed it. Another joy of the summer is students joining the team for a summer job. This year 2 students joined the Exact Research team for a few weeks to do some design and engineering assignments. I like this a lot, for various reasons.

1. For every team it's good to bring in some outsiders to provide new and different views on work we have been doing so far. It helps the team against tunnel vision.

2. Generation Y are our future customers, it doesn't hurt to have the Generation X team, including me, learn a bit about them.

3. I like to give young people an opportunity to learn something and help them starting their careers, while they help me and the team to do jobs we don't have time for.

4. They inspire me!

Jeffry and Edwin, Thank you for your contribution...

Image credit: Lin Pernille

First post written with Chromium on OS-X

FriendFeed we had a good time together, bye bye, enjoy Facebook

2009-08-11T23:43:00.000+02:00

I love FriendFeed from very early on. I clearly remember my buddy Ronald Voets telling me about a cool service some ex Googlers had setup. It was easy to get started, including already then a Facebook application.

It didn't take long before FriendFeed became the center of my life-streaming and until I find a new alternative it continues to power the life-stream on this blog. I even went so far to say that I won't use a service if I can include it in my FriendFeed stream.

I continuously try many new services but there are not many that stick with me. FriendFeed was one of them, although my usage significantly changed over time. In the early days I had limited followers and saw it as an alternative to twitter, but after a while when my followers increased I couldn't keep up. The groups and discussions made it easier, but still too much information to constantly follow. However saved searches and even instant search are great research tools. When you want to dig up some information it's a great way to use the different search capabilities. Further I would almost daily have a peek at the 'best of day' what was just a nice feature too make sure you kept up to date to the most current events.

Now after yesterdays announcement that FriendFeed got acquired by Facebook at first I was confused. Of course it's great for the FriendFeed guys to make some money and I also understand their arguments of synergies and working in a team with the same spirit. I do recognize this very well, cos engineers want to work with similar talented people. However FriendFeed and Facebook are so different, It's business versus friends, it's open versus closed, it's honest versus deceiving, it's black versus white.

I can now only hope that the 12 people David can turn around the 800 people Goliath and make sure that the great FriendFeed lives on....

Summer break, Time for some Hands-On work!

2009-08-09T21:36:00.000+02:00

In the last two weeks I did quite some hands-on work with the research team. Since it's summer, there aren't many management meetings giving me some time to work with the research team. I closely worked with some team members on solutions, wrote some actual code and of course had many questions. I liked it a lot:

1. It gives me something tangible that shows my contribution to the solution. I know it's silly, but at a certain point it's nice if you can touch something.

2. It allowed me to move some stuff forward into the planning, because of my hand-on contribution added some additional capacity. It probably delayed some other projects due to my questions, but I just ignore that for the moment.

3. It made me appreciate the team even more. I used to write a bit of code in the past, but these highly interactive AJAX websites are quite a bit more complex pieces of engineering than I was used to. These guys and gals are real rock stars!

4. It also confirmed that we have been doing the right things. A deep dive into the solution and working with the components really gives you a lot more insight that the stories told.

By now those that work close with me know what I'm talking about, but the others probably have no clue. We're progressing on one of the Exact Research projects and will share it with you when we feel it's fit enough to do so. I hope this can just be sooner than later

Image credit: Justin

A New Laptop, My Worst Nightmare

2009-08-07T00:13:00.000+02:00

My good old Sony Vaio is dying on me. A little bit too often it's giving 'no operating system found' messages. Usually shaking it a bit solves the problem, but it's getting worse and it doesn't give me a lot of confidence. I need to invest into a new one, it's about time, the Sony Vaio served me well.

About 3 years ago I selected it based on a performance weight ratio. It has a 13.3" screen that is big enough for daily work and it's carbon casing makes it not too heavy. It was good to travel around with, although a bit on the larger site. Times have changed and today I defined new criteria. I want more mobility, and I settle for less performance, because for most of my daily work I use the browser and less local computing. So the criteria are very simple: 12" screen, a small SSD, a build in camera and less than 1.5kg.

Now you would think it would be very simple to find something matching these criteria. I'm sure it exists, but the web sites of the major vendors are all a night mare. They all proudly present their cool and colorful designs, the lifestyle value, etc... I like this... but also give me a model selector. Just a few examples how crazy it has become.
1. Dell doesn't show laptops on the home page. I first have to select if I want to use it at home, in a small and medium business, in the public sector or in a large enterprise. I want to use it everywhere! However after selecting any of the above options there is a reasonable product selector. Unfortunately nothing that matches my criteria.
2. Sony offers at the home page some navigation to laptops, but no product selector. They have series based on all the letters of the alphabet that they expect you to explore one by one. After exploring I learned that I need to choose between 11" or 13" screen.
3. Hewlett Packard, starts good. A direct link to Laptops on the homepage that brings you directly into a reasonable product selector. However I again need to choose between home and business use and there is nothing that matches my criteria.
4. Lenovo also provides a direct link to Laptops on the homepage leading to a product selector. However they first confuse me with the question if I need a value line, Idea Pad or Think Pad... I've no idea. The product selector on 12" gives me 5 ThinkPad X200 models with very extensive descriptions. Do they really think I understand this. There is no way I can easily see which one matches my other criteria. I'm guessing there is a model with a build in camera and I really have no idea what is the recommended Mobile Media Base. Anyway... so far the closest to my requirements. Unfortunately they are so ugly

Do I feel good and all excited about getting a new laptop. No, absolutely not, while I was really excited when I got my Macbook Air. May be I should just try to repair my good old Sony Vaio friend.

Kill or Keep?

2009-08-04T21:17:00.000+02:00

Last week Plaxo lost all it's value, good moment to think about cleaning up al the registrations for the various services that I've used once in a while. There are always many services worth a try, but only a few stay valuable over a longer period of time.

For most most unused services the decision process to kill or keep is simple. Have I used the services recently, does it provide me value and if not delete the account. However for some services it's less simple and Plaxo is an example one of those.

Although Plaxo has lost it's initial value there is still some value in it.
1. It offers me a public profile that gets reasonably high in a Google search when searching for my name
2. It services as an outpost for this blog and it does generate a few comments
3. There is referral traffic from Plaxo to my blog
4. It provides me a vanity url to my profile: http://aadjemonkeyrock.myplaxo.com

For now I've decided to keep, maintain my profile, keep it as an outpost but not actively participate in the discussion.

What would you do? Kill of Keep?

Image credit: Jelene

NUYK - A unique and smart address book

2009-08-02T13:28:00.000+02:00

In a reaction of my disappointment by Plaxo, Flavio commented about NUYK being similar to Plaxo in the old days when it was still about the address book. This was a good reason for me to try and play around.

NUYK, what is by the way not the easiest name, offers and online address book that can easily be synchronized with Outlook, Mobile phones and promises synchronization with Gmail and Hotmail. Clearly the Mac OS-X address book is still missing here. Besides the address book it offers you to maintain a profile with extended information about yourself. The profile has various privacy settings and you can control how much your contacts can see about you. You are all the time in control, what is very important for this kind of service. You can learn more here.

Besides the internal profile for your contacts you have the ability to define a public profile, you can see mine here, and control what will be publicly visible about you. Unfortunately there is no vanity url available for the profile and the options to control the content are limited. However I do believe the UNYK will improve in these areas with proper community feedback.

Some of the improvements I would like to see are:
1. Synchronization with my Mac address book
2. Vanity URL on my public profile
3. The ability to sort my address list by first name, last name
4. More privacy options to make groups of information available to groups of people
5. More information to be added to my profile, e.g. urls of other profiles I have.
6. More options to control the information on my public profile
7. Widget for my public profile, to be embedded in other web resources I manage
8. A less spammy approach for invitations. UNYK will not send anything without your consent, but you have to be very careful. Currently it wants to send to each and every email address in your list. My the looks of it, it will also send duplicate invitations to the same person. Note: I have not send out a single invitation, and will absolutely not do bulk invitations.

However this is all nice and sweet, but a service like this is useless if your buddies aren't using it. Currently only a few of my contacts are known and clearly in my network UNYK hasn't reached the adoption of Plaxo yet. I will continue to play around, provide some good feedback to UNYK and may be the guys are able to create a really nice and compelling service out of this.

Have you tried the service and what is your opinion?