Cognitive Cities. Join the Conference about the Smart City of the Future.

Januar 29th, 2011 • Knowledge, People, Tech
Tags: Berlin, CoCities, Conferences, Creativity, Experimental, Future, Predicition, Smart Cities, Third Wave, Underway, World

It was a bit like a Deja vu. But a good one. For the first time in a year I worked with my old partner in crime Johannes Kleske in my office at Blast Radius Amsterdam. Professionally the two of us spent the lion’s share of our last couple of years together. We share a similar perspective on how marketing should be done and I consider Johannes as one of the smarter guys that I have met so far. In short – I am happy to work a couple of weeks with an old friend.

Many of you know Johannes and his friends Peter and Igor who together form the Berlin-based strategy thinktank Third Wave. And now that their young consultancy is fully operational they are launching their first major initiative in collaboration with YourNeighbours. The Cognitive Cities conference on Feb 26/27 in Berlin.

‘Cognitive Cities’ is about how our cities (and our lifes) become smarter, more liveable, more joyful and efficient through the use of technology. As far as I know it is one of the first conferences about this topic in Europe and the guys at Third Wave have convened an impressive group of digital and cultural thought leaders who will share their perspectives with the audience. As far as I know the conference itself is going to be more than just theory with a very urban and mobile conference concept that understands Berlin not just as the frame but also as the playground for understanding Cognitive Cities.

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Quora. Twitter gets a Jeopardy Update.

Januar 6th, 2011 • 9 comments Social, Tech, Trends, Twitter
Tags: buzz, Quora, Social, Tech, Tools, Trends, Twitter, Viral, World

Quora. Currently my favourite example of an overbuzzed platform and I strongly recommend to follow the bizarre network effects that are taking place these days.

Quora is a knowledge platform that was founded in summer 2009 by Facebook’s former CTO Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever. Quora received some funding in March 2010 and is in closed beta since summer 2010. Quora basically is a polished version of a forum. It merges forum functionalities with social platforms such as twitter or Facebook to generate a new type of Q&A platform. That’s not dramatically new but it’s a nice, well presented concept.

Quora turned red hot in late December 2010 and early January 2011. And it seems everyone tries to get on board asap. On January 2nd Techcrunch mentioned Quora as one of the 7 technologies that will rock 2011. Quote: ‘Quora will have its twitter moment’:

…2011, which I believe will be the year Quora has its Twitter moment and start to really take off. Quora represents a bigger technology trend, which is the layering of an interest graph on top of people’s social graph. On Quora, you can follow not only people, but topics and questions. It defines the world by your interests, not just the people you may know or admire. This is a powerful concept and is not limited to Quora (both Twitter and Facebook also want to own the interest graph), but Quora is designed from the ground up to expose and help you explore your interests.

I agree that Quora is a great platform. It nevertheless is not the reinvention of earned media. And I don’t see how a Forum 2.0 + Digg functionalities should come close to a general, broad interaction platform. Anyway for a couple of days the tech press keeps on posting about Quora day in and out. Did you for example know that the former AOL chairman is posting on Quora as if there was no tomorrow? No? I didn’t as well. And I don’t care.

The reason why Quora is so successful is definitely related to it being a helpful, well set up platform. But the momentum behind the current craziness is based on some superstars of the scene pretending Friendfeed, Plancast, Foursquare Quora is the reinvention of anything digital. Oh, and if David Armano and Jeremiah Owyang are posting there as well…we all follow, right?

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Holograms. Sony has just reinvented them.

November 2nd, 2010 • Allgemein, Tech
Tags: Business, Cool, Experimental, Ideas, Lifestyle, Media, sony, Strategy, Tech, Trends, TV, We like

Can you remember Emperor Palpatine’s hologram talking to Darth Vader? Sure you can. That scene looks pretty 1970′s compared to this awesome 360-Degree Autostereoscopic Display Prototype that Sony has just developed. It’s a prototype. But I guess that is also very likely part of our future media consumption. Awesome isn’t it?

Light and Magic. Prague celebrates The Orloj’s 600th Anniversary.

Oktober 18th, 2010 • Display, Events, Tech, We like
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Out of Home, Outdoor, Prague, Presentation, Projection, Tech, Tourism, visual, World

The Orloj is a medieval astronomical tower clock mounted to the southern wall of Prague’s Old City Hall. It consists of three main elements – the astronomical dial, representing the position of the Sun and Moon in the sky and displaying various astronomical details; “The Walk of the Apostles”, a clockwork hourly show of figures of the Apostles and other moving sculptures; and a calendar dial with medallions representing the months (via Wikipedia).

To celebrate The Orloj’s 600th anniverary Czech motion design studio The Macula have mapped a stunning walk through the six centuries of history on the front of the old tower. I have rarely seen a more convincing light projection spectacle lately… (via Fubiz)

Interface Design. A Day in 2014.

September 6th, 2010 • 5 comments Tech, Tools
Tags: Case Study, Cool, Creativity, Design, Experimental, Future, Ideas, Interfaces, Media, Mobile, Prediction, Presentation, Study, Tech, Tools, Touch, Usability, UX, visual, World

We all love interface design studies, don’t we? Notorious Swedish UX company TAT.SE has conducted an experiment in open innovation of User Interfaces. And the winner is this little case study staging a possible day in 2014. Nice one. I want the mirror (via).

HTML5. A Great Intro to What is New.

August 23rd, 2010 • Tech
Tags: Agencies, Blast Radius, Cool, Development, flash, HTML5, Prediction, Presentation, Tech, Tools, Trends, visual

When you start a new job it is always extremely interesting to find out about your coworkers after a while. Who is this guy across the table actually? And what did he or she do before we actually started collaborating?
One of my new colleagues who really surprised me is Bobby van der Sluis.

Bobby is Technical Experience Director here at Blast Radius, Amsterdam and a veteran of Flash Development. He is author of UFO and co-author of SWFObject 2 (along with a lot of other projects), which are both well-known open source JavaScript libraries for detecting the Adobe Flash Player and embedding Flash content in web pages. In addition to that he does publish articles at A list apart quite often and speaks at conferences. Oooh….and he is also a very nice guy – a fact that should not go unnoticed here as well.

Anyway, last week Bobby held a very insightful presentation about Flash HTML5 and his personal perspectives on its progress. It is interesting to watch Flash veterans such as Bobby to reinvent their job profiles and start developing on a similar  different platform.

Here is Bobby’s presentation. Check out his blog as well and follow him on Slideshare.

PSFK. The Future of Retail.

Juni 3rd, 2010 • Retail, Social Business, Tech, Trends
Tags: Business, Creativity, Experimental, Future, Ideas, Prediction, PSFK, Report, Retail, Social Business Design, Strategy, Trends, World

As the world intertwines the web and reality, retail becomes one of the most crucial sectors to stage new marketing experiences for customers. Notorious PSFK has just staged its deck about ‘The future of Retail‘. The free 80 page analysis highlights how new technologies and senses play a crucial role in shaping shopping experiences. The trends identified within this document and the examples used to bring them to life are inspired by innovation from around the globe. And as usual it comes with a handy guide what is going to be hot in tomorrow’s retail experiences. PSFK, I love your decks.

Hey Mashable. I think you can drop the google Buzz button now.

April 27th, 2010 • 9 comments Social, Tech, Tools
Tags: google, google Buzz, mashable, Prediction, Social Networks, Tech, Tools, Twitter

I don’ t want to say, I told you so. But I told you so. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about google’s twitter killer social network thing that is not as cool as the other things with massive privacy flaws. Chitika has the figures:

February 9th, 2010 – the day Buzz was launched – the search engines lit up with queries.  The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”

By the 15th, searches for the service had dwindled to less than ten a day, and since February 26th there has been a constant stream of one search per day.

Finally I want to add an artwork which I have created from share buttons on mashable’s homepage. I think we can drop the google buzz button now, can we?

World Domination. We like.

April 24th, 2010 • 6 comments Business, Social, Tech, Tools, Trends
Tags: Business, Facebook, Future, I like, Open Graph, Philosophy, Social Graph, Social Networks, Strategy, Tech, Tools, Trends, World

With about 420 million active users (more than 50% of them logging in every day) Facebook really is a James Bond villain’s dream come true. And no, it is not just successful. Facebook is killing it’s competitors. It has simply buried Myspace, Orkut and others and won’t stop growing. I don’t know what is going to be the No 1 social network 2020. But currently I bet it still might be Facebook.

What was once google, is – in parts – about to become our favourite Evil Empire. google may still rule everything Pull but Zuckerberg works hard to turn its business into a Push Superpower. If you search for the Large Hadron Collider you choose google. But Facebook is your choice for the restaurant around the corner and your fave sneaker brand. And since wednesday things are on the move again…

One Graph to Rule them all

In case you haven’t heard the term Social Graph before – it will either become important or obsolete in the future – simply because Facebook wants to own or dominate it. In his 2007 article ‘Thoughts on the Social Graph‘ Brad Fitzpatrick talked about the Social Graph as ‘the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related‘. Basically it is the people you know, the stuff you listen to, read, tweet, and tag, and what you put on maps – and the question how you access and distribute the information to your friends. By now there wasn’t one but many disperse social graphs. But the more we are intertwined on Facebook as the one connector, the better the platform’s chances to become the knot of earth’s social graph. Now, after some technical adjustments last week Facebook is de facto trying to nothing less than that.

Well, world domination looks a little bit different, I have to admit. Mark Zuckerberg’s tools for world domination are so unobrusive that nobody understand them who is not part of the industry. What Facebook delivered on its F8 conference looked…well…small…but may have more than significant outcomes.

• Cornerstone of Facebook’s conquest is the Open Graph Protocol -  basically a techn0logical extension of the social network that treats the free web (the artist formerly known as Not Facebook) as Facebook entities.
• This can be studied through Facebook’s well known ‘I like’ button (plus many more new social plugins) which is now available for every web page (look up). Facebook will treat blog posts (which are part of the system) just like Facebook posts – and of course draws data from them.
• Facebook Fanpages and ‘Fans’ do not exist anymore, get replaced by ‘I like’
• Facebook Connect as a quasi-brand will be dumped
• And a couple of other revisions. Facebook did not go too much into details but it will soon finish off all other competitors in the economy by offering its own currency and geo-location solutions.

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Apple. Inside the App Store’s Rejection Department.

Januar 29th, 2010 • Mobile, Tech
Tags: Apple, Apps, Cool, Funny, Ideas, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, Truth

The unparalleled freedom of Web 2.0 can nowhere be witnessed as fully as in Apple’s App Store. Well, of course there is criteria to become part of this exclusive digital warehouse – clear, transparent criteria to leave no room for speculation how to get in there. And in order to stop everyone with bad or fake ideas to take advantage of them, Apple, and you, the user, Apple has now opened the doors to its App Store Rejection Department. Thanks to Chris for this link.