I just finished the book ‘My Start Up Life - What a (very) young CEO learned on his journey through Sillicon Valley’ by Ben Casnocha. Casnocha tells his life story about how he, as a 14 year old boy, started his own company. He takes you on a journey and tells about the things he encountered being a CEO of a ‘Start-up’. The story is inspiring and interesting. In between the story he advises aspiring CEO’s with lessons he has learned.
It’s a nice read with about 200 pages. The advise is obvious, but very important. These are the lessons that stuck most for me:
Dare to take a risk.
Don’t try to be a perfectionist. ‘Good’ is good enough.
Profile yourself. (Work on your physical appearance, network and online identity.)
Really listen to your clients and try to solve their problem and address their problems in presentations and communication.
All in all a good book with some inspiring advise.
Just came accross Ubiquity. It’s a plugin for Firefox which enables text driven commands. We’re stuck in an interface paradigm where point and click rules but some things can be easier done using language. Ubiquity enables users to use text driven commands to perform tasks such as:
A wikipedia search,
a google search,
updating twitter,
adding something to Google Calendar, and much more.
Check the demo below:
I’ve been using it for about an hour and I’m already loving it.
I’ve been playing Fifa 2009 online against other players. There seems to be a ‘leaderboard’ where you can check how much you progress. Though, it’s all very unclear and EA doesn’t have a reasonable explanation. So I’ve done some research and here’s the result:
When you play someone online (in a ranked match) you receive or lose ’skill points’. The more ’skill points’ you get the higher your ’skill rank’ becomes. How much ’skill points’ you receive or lose depends on:
Skill rank of the opponent.
The difference in stars of the teams being picked. (If you pick a 3 star team and beat an opponent playing with a 5 star team you will get more skill points when you win).
You get skill points for completed passes, possession, shots on target, successful tackles, etc.
You only get ranked in the leaderboards if you are one of the top 10.000 players. At the moment you have to get a 1600+ skill ranking to get into the top 10.000. I believe you can get a maximun of around 50 skill points for one match. Also when you play a match and the game is paused or finished you will see points being displayed below your username. These points are not your ’skill points’ but your ‘EA World points’ so you can ignore them. To see your ’skill points’ and ’skill level’ go to ‘Player Hub > Career Stats > Skill Points.’
Good luck! If you have any questions please comment.
Today I wanted to put some new music on my Zune. I tried to boot the device as I haven’t used for a couple of days. But my Zune decided to stop loading and got stuck on the start up screen. When I went looking for a solution I discovered that it’s an epedemic. Many Zune users report the same problem. It looks like a software problem and I hope Microsoft will fix it soon. Because the Zune isn’t being sold in the Netherlands I’ll probably wont get any support. I’m already looking for a replacement. iPod maybe?
Update: My Zune works again! I booted it yesterday evening and it went in ‘upgrade mode’. I had to put all my songs back on but it works OK now. I guess it was something do with the internal clock not capable of registering a leap year (366 days) and which resolved itself when the new year started.
Paper is a good medium. It’s easy to read articles on paper and it’s very portable. But it is a bitch to update. Newspapers have to put out a new version almost daily. Currently there are devices on the market which are easy on the eyes and portable as well. Such as the Amazon Kindle. Although the reviews aren’t great this device offers the basic functionality needed for the New Newspaper (the more costly iRex Illiad could do the trick as well). It’s portable, easy to read and updating the content is simple, which I will get to next.
The content
The user needs to decide when the content will be updated. This could be every minute, hour, day, week, etcetera. This is possible through the Wireless internet access which is available on the Kindle as well as on the iRex Illiad. Making use of RSS Feeds the user can select all the news sites he or she wants to follow.
For example: I want to follow at least 100 websites posting around 5 posts a day. I add the feeds to a newsreader like Google Reader. But I don’t have time to read 500 articles a day. I only want the most valuable news and not waste any time on uninteresting articles. This is where AideRSS comes in. By implementing AideRSS in your Google Reader I’m able to filter posts. I can set my own filter level if I want more or less articles. The same way as traditional newspapers filter all the incoming news and only publish the best. Only this time I’ve selected my own sources, the news is specified to my own taste. All you have to do is hook up your Kindle to Google Reader.
Bonus: The Form
And, if you are a bit nostalgic, you can even use the traditional form. The application Times takes your feeds and puts them in a traditional newspaper format. This enhances scanning articles and makes it easier to read. Too bad it’s only available for the Mac at the moment. So it’s waiting for someone to port it to the Kindle or Iliad.
I’m watching a DVD with my girlfriend. An actor enters the scene and my brain wakes up. I know this guy from another movie but for the love of god I can’t remember which one. For the next couple of minutes I’m wreckhing my brain ignoring the plot of the movie. Eventually I give in, pause the movie, dodge the evil eye of my girlfriend, boot my computer and go to IMDB. The “AHA” moment is satasfying but now I have to rewind the movie.
The Solution:
An integration of a DVD with IMDB. As soon as this mystery actor or actress appears you can retrieve their IMDB details with the push of a button. You don’t have to pause the movie because you get a simple overview in a small seperate screen which you can easily turn off. Of course you want your DVD player to be connected to the tubes of the interweb delivering real-time data, but for now I think settling for (static) data to be retrieved from the DVD a more realistic option.
How it could work:
Below I have made some screens detailing the way it could work.
You see an actor you want to know more about and you hit the IMDB button:
Last week Bill Gates introduced the touchwall. A glimpse of the future? We’ve seen this before. Tom Cruise as Chief John Anderton slides through vast amounts of data using his hands in the Minority Report. But do we really NEED this piece of technology to enhance our interface capabilities or do we WANT this because it looks so cool in Minority Report?
We WANT it!
In Foresight and Hindsight: The Case of the Telephone Ithiel del Sola Pool et al. take a closer look at the predictions made about the social effect of the telephone. Predictions made by inventors and big telephone companies had a big chance of becoming reality. They created a future, sold it to the public and they went on inventing this future.
This concept is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. We see Cruise flicking through all sorts of data using his hands and fingers. We think: “That’s great! I want that to be a wall in my living room!” and six years after the movie has been released we see this becoming reality. And we WANT it!
Do we NEED it?
But do we actually NEED this piece of technology? Is this going to break us free from the desktop interface? Jakob Nielsen and Don Gentner made a claim against the desktop interface back in 1996 in their article The Anti-mac Interface: “We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore.” (Gentner and Nielsen, 1996:1). One of their main arguments is that we ignore the value of language:
“The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It’s as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have lost all the power of language…” (Gentner and Nielsen, 1996:3)
Although the technique is very cool we still need to consider: Is this a step forward or is this a step backward?
Sources
Pool, I. de Sola et al. “Foresight and Hindsight: The Case of the Telephone” The Social Impact of the Telephone. Ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1977.
Gentner, Don and Jakob Nielsen. “The Anti-Mac Interface”. 1996. Link to the article. (PDF)
Some people claim that games might break us free from the boring interface shaped as a desktop. But sometimes even games get it wrong. Even the successful games.
I will discuss three interface mistakes made by three popular XBOX360 games released this year. Halo3, Assassins Creed and Call of Duty 4.
1) Unable to skip cut scenes - culprit: Assassins Creed
Assassins Creed is a fantastic interactive game. You are able to fly over the rooftops of Medieval cities and kill unsuspecting targets in various entertaining ways. But… you can’t skip the cut scenes. Nope. You have to sit through them. And they are boring, very boring and long. I understand the goal is to create an interactive story, but at least give the player an option to bail out!
2) Bad visual indicators - culprit: Halo3
The most hyped game of this year. And don’t get me wrong, it is a great game. But sometimes it’s so damn hard to see if you killed someone. Especially when you and your teammate are pumping bullets in the same enemy. Eventually your foe will drop to his knees and you have to check the scores to see who got the kill. In a game like Halo 3, where ranking is a big part of the fun, keeping track of your kills is very important. The visual indicator which states you killed someone is a small sentence which pops up on the left bottom corner of your screen. It is almost invisible.
3) Ugly menu’s - culprit: Call of Duty 4.
Speaking about visual indicators, this fourth installment of Call of Duty gets it right. An announcement in the centre of your screen informs you how much points you just earned with a kill or action. Great! Too bad the the menu’s in this game are just butt-ugly. So much care is put in the gameplay, the balancing of the weapons and the crafting of maps but the ball was dropped when they slapped on this Frankenstein of a menu. The font being used is getting on my nerves, it looks severely outdated. The colouring and shapes make you wonder if you accidentally popped in Call of Duty 2. The subtitle of the game is ‘Modern Warfare’ but the menu’s look rather ancient.
Although games might be the future of the interface some mistakes made are very annoying. Game developers should take as much care in the interface as they do in other elements of the game.
Artist: Phoenix
Artist: Fleet Foxes
Artist: Bon Iver
Artist: Beulah
Paper is a good medium. It’s easy to read articles on paper and it’s very portable. But it is a bitch to update. Newspapers have to put out a new version almost daily. Currently there are devices on the market which are easy on the eyes and portable as well. Such as the 
