Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

I am not into soccer, or football. Honestly, seeing all that overpaid testosterone run after a little leather ball: it’s kind of silly.  Let’s face it, Belgians are not even so good at it. But, knowing that my good friends @cleval and @guidooohh told me Anderlecht was top-class-can-not-go-wrong material, I kept one eye on the screen. For an endless amount of time. And that just to see them go down… on penalties. Mind you, not because the other goalie was good. But just because these Anderlecht players forgot how to kick a ball at a goal. To help my friends out, at these for them difficult times, here is a simple how to… Better luck next time .

• Take a couple of steps back from the ball.
• Have your striking foot in front of your non-striking foot.
• Make a decision on what side of the goal you are going for. Do not change your mind.
• Hit the ball with the inside of your foot.
• Hit it with power but focus more on the placement than the power.
• Go for the low corners. This will make it hard for the goalie.
  • It is also a good choice to go for the top corners, but this is more risky and requires skill, so practice this to make sure you can do it consistently.
  • Do not stare at the spot you’re going for, but try not to deceive the goalie by looking at the other side because this will affect your accuracy.
  • Do not go for the middle.
  • Try not to go for top corners unless you are confident.

Some people have way too much time. Really. The Italian government is massively sponsoring some heavy weight lawyers to prove that Michelangelo’s David belongs to the State, and not to the city of Florence. The city of Florence is countering with some Hugo-Boss-suited grey-haired law specialists of its own to claim David for the city.

All of this bleeding edge law technologists are using misty and dusty papers dating well back to 1500 (!) AC.  Honestly. Michelangelo carved David out of a piece of rejected block of Carrara marble, making it one of the most astonishing and beautiful pieces of art. There was no Italy at that moment. There was a Florentine Republic. So who owns a piece of that magnitude?

Does the current state of Egypt own the Pyramids? Do the Lascaux cave paintings belong to the Republic of France? To whom belong the Dead Sea rolls? Can you claim the Mayan cities as your own? Can you prove Manchu Picchu is legally yours? Could the UK sell off Stonehenge?

All of this makes about as much sense to me as warm beer. It’s like those crazy certificates that give you ownership of a star, a piece of land on the moon, of some acres of sun…

David is world heritage. He belongs to us. He belongs to our children. Lawyers should stop quibbling about ownership, and start determining who is ultimately responsible for its preservation.

As a watch lover, I’m very fond of Patek Phillippe’s slogan: “You never actually own it. You merely look after it for the next generation”…

Hilarity when the Molenbeek police rushed in to save…. the @pnbr5 demo car. We positioned the Lotus on our parking lot, complete with some nice smoke puffin out of the smoking machine in the trunk. The brave officers where almost halfway shooting their fire extinguishers from the hip, when we could prove them all was fine and under control. This neighborhood is in excellent hands!

Armed with a tiny Sony Cybershot HX5V, Romain Pergeaux and Alex Profit, made stops in London, Cairo, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York. They crammed three weeks of intensive driving in 80″. Jules would be proud…

Now how crazy can you get? Most of us spend ages in school and universities to get fabulous degrees hoping to find that magic job that will make us famous… and rich.
Meet Ice Cream Man, a jolly fellow handing free ice cream to the exhausted crowds @South By South West. Matt Allen started his bizarre career in the summer of 2004, when he was driving an amazingly cute 1969 Chevrolet Step Van through Oregon looking for adventure. He wanted to become the most famous ice cream man in the world. He began giving away his ice cream for free, always good to get immensely popular .

250,000 free ice creams later, Ice Cream Man has become the living proof of the American Dream. “This is about getting people to think about things a bit differently, proving that you can do anything with your life,” says Allen in his “Of the Wookie” booklet: “I want to give away ice cream. It’s that simple. I can’t be the only one who thinks this is a good idea. Why not bring all of these like-minded people together to do great things?”
With big brands sponsoring massive dollars in his one man mission, Ice Cream Man is a happy camper making other people happy…. With free ice-cream. Is there an MBA in happiness?

Well, honestly… I have seen quite a few strange menus in my life. But the one @the Four Seasons hotel in Austin beats it. Big Time. Look at the bottom of the picture it says: “kindly do not feed the animals. It’s bad or their health”. Being on the Four Seasons Menu card cannot be very healthy either

Witnessed a great keynote by metaio on augmented solutions. While until recently augmented reality seemed to be limited to very exotic and expensive equipment like the Apache helicopter or some Q-designed James Bond gadgets, it is soon coming to devices very very near you .

Augmented reality applications allow relevant information and exciting features to be overlaid on top of the visual reality. Usually this would be through a laptop or -even more handy-, a mobile phone.

Noora Guldemond from metaio demonstrated with skill (great presentation with utterly visual slides. Refreshing after some of the other death-by-Powerpoint I witnessed here @ #SXSW) how AR starts interacting in a compelling way with our increasingly mobile lifestyle.

AR tags trigger -once decoded by the devices camera- a plethora of information that is projected on top of the reality, making use of data more easy, or adding exciting possibilities. Creating visual interaction in both real and virtual worlds makes even dull every day products as a shoe into exciting high-tech game and content controllers.

Can’t wait to try more of this out!

Walking through #SXSW you meet an interesting variety of people who have one thing in common: Social Media. And to be fairly honest, after being immersed for a full 48 hours in this digital Mekka:  most of the tweeps around here are useless .

Maybe I should blame my jetlag, or is it my down to earth Belgian mentality… but a lot of these so called digital upper crowd make no sense at all. I hear a lot of quacking about nice dreams, but three or four questions into the conversation you notice that they have no clue what the real-world-out-there rules of engagement are.

What is the benefit of the tool/platform/technique/gimmick for the user? How does it make life better or more interesting? How do you monetize it? Who will you partner with to make it happen? Is an-all English tool to conquer the multilingual world the best you could come up with? Have you realized not ALL people use an iPhone?

I see a lot of lonely, nearly desperate people with shiny airbooks struggling to explain the one great idea they have.

Once the connection with the real world is lost, even the most brilliant nerd is doomed. My advice to these too pale web ghosts is: unplug. For a while. Take some air. Take a minute AFK (Away From Keyboard). Meet real people. See what they’re like, what drives them. How business is done.

You’ll see, you’ll get there. Eventually.

Luckily, there are still enough people here who DO know what they are talking about…

My jet-lagged-bones woke me up a full three hours before my alarm clock was set, so it was a quick, dirty, short night (had an argument with my air-conditioning unit on noise pollution). But hey, sleep is way overrated anyway .

Finally met the complete Porter Novelli Austin gang. Funny to shake hands with some of my favorite online avatars… Great also to see some good old familiar faces. Setting up the #SXSW booth, picking up our badges, testing equipment; fine-tuning the plethora of Social Media channels that we’re going to lean on (heavily ) over the next days…

It may sound fairly surprising to you, but I am a gadget freak. Collecting and using small battery operated devices is a fairly innocent but truly expensive disease.  So slowly -but surely- my shelves get buried with PDA’s (yes, I started with a Psion), PC’s, laptops, netbooks and smarty phones. And you know how it is, just as you get used to operating it, a newer, better, smarter, quicker and fancier version pops up. I guess someone has to sustain this faltering economy. 

Having passed way too much time in airports, media markets and online stores lately, I noticed that my taste evolved. Before, I was irresistibly drawn to the most performant object. Now I select my toys on real use expectations. Why would I want a water-cooled quad processor in a lightweight laptop that I will mostly use for internet access and PowerPoint? What’s the use of 16 USB ports, when I can connect all that matters through WiFi, Bluetooth and a high def screen cable? Why carry an extended battery when free power is available everywhere, including trains and planes?

I notice that lately I am mostly hunting for practicality, lightweight and coolness. I pay for fashionable usability over overkilled specs. I silently laugh when I see wonnabees use enough processing power to recalibrate Wall Street just to update their Facebook.

Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I lost it. I might even get more sensible. But when trop is too much, I’ll go for good enough…

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated with travel, moving,  going places. Now that I’m finally in a position and an age to travel a lot, I got a ferocious dislike of public transport, airplanes, and security checks. Let’s say timetables and security officers don’t like me very much .

Man, seeing captain Kirk and pointy eared  Spock being teleported into the most incredible places  by a simple “beam me up, Scotty” command still makes me raving jealous.

And look now here, scientists at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute successfully teleported data from one atom to another in a container a full meter away.  They beamed stuff!  A full meter away! From one container to another!  Time magazine claims that “… a landmark in the brain-bending field known as quantum information processing, the experiment doesn’t quite have the cool factor of body transportation; one atom merely transforms the other so it acts just like the original. Still, atom-to-atom teleportation has major implications for creating super-secure, ultra-fast computers.”

Not cool? They beamed stuff! You’ll see, one of our next meetings, I’m going to get beamed directly into a meeting room, far far away…. You can have all my travel points and air miles…

Bluetooth SIG, the organization driving development of Bluetooth® wireless technology, launched a global ’Sharing4Caring’ initiative to help third world entrepreneurs gain access to low-cost financing. Bluetooth SIG teamed-up with Kiva, a person-to-person micro-lending website, and is asking people to take 2 minutes of their time to click on a ‘I want to care’ button on their website. For every click, the organization lends 1 dollar to Kiva entrepreneurs.

Why this project? Mike Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, on ‘Sharing4Caring’ initiative:

“The Bluetooth SIG represents more than 12,000 members, so sharing is at the very center of everything we do. We share intellectual property, best practices, creative ideas, everything that enables us to take the next step in further enhancing Bluetooth technology. We decided to take this one step further and show how sharing can improve lives of people all over the world if we put our will and energy to it. That’s also why, after careful selection, we decided that Kiva, with its strong focus on sharing, was the best fit for us in this endeavor.”

Wanna help? Visit the Bluetooth SIG website now and take 2 minutes of your time to help them do good!